Essays
“Democracy Happily Ever: Good Spells in the Works of Robin McKinley”
Submitted to the ALSCW 2025 panel “American Literature and Democracy”
Abstract:
I’ve been pondering what I can do to help save our democracy, and I do believe literature offers the answers we need.[1] In my search for imaginative possibilities, I’ve found no richer ground than works of fantasy. It would take a miracle for all this to end happily, or a magic spell, and thanks to my favorite books, I have a few tricks up my sleeve.
Spells are acts of performative truth:[2] you say the words and then make them happen (“He said, ‘Let there be light!’ / ‘Lumos!’ and there was light”). How do we make our words true? We do what we say. If we want light, then we have to be the light. Jesus gives us the template for the Good Spell (Gospel): he kept his promises by incarnationally living them out and then dying for us, giving all he had to make his salvific words true.
The American author who’s taught me most about good spells is Robin McKinley, a contemporary fantasy writer whose heroines do magic called forth by their deep desire to protect the people and places they love and then ritually performed through their embodied, self-sacrificial efforts. Unlike Christ, they don’t know if it will work, but they still try with everything they have, monumental efforts that are rewarded in the eucatastrophes.[3] In Spindle’s End (2000), McKinley’s retelling of Sleeping Beauty, the cursed princess and her friends con the entire kingdom by pretending that the curse is already broken, and she then makes it true by taking on an impossible fight with the evil sorceress rather than succumbing to sleep. In Chalice (2008), the heroine is a beekeeper who saves her beleaguered demesne with her faithful prayer walks and final sacrifice of her beloved bees; she’s a spelling bee champion, but only at great personal cost.
McKinley’s novels have shaped me as a person and a Christian, and she (along with fantasy greats from across the pond like Tolkien and Lewis) has inspired me to try a good spell of my own. I’ve started a movement called Fun over Fear that uses parties as spiritual weapons to fight the fear and division overshadowing our country, and I’ve been practicing what I preach: I’m submitting this abstract late because I spent the weekend celebrating Juneteenth and the Summer Solstice. You can read my epistles “Dear America, Let’s Party!” (inspired by Prince Caspian) and “In Defense of Partying” and see my festive performances at funoverfear.org.
[1] I may be biased as someone who’s dedicated her life to studying English, but I’m certainly earnest about it; I’ve heard that’s what’s important.
[2] Thanks to my friend Dr. Jon Askonas for recommending Pope Benedict XVI’s “Spe salvi” to me with its clear explanation of the performative nature of hope.
[3] Thanks to Tolkien for introducing me to this helpful (and hopeful) term in his essay “On Fairy-Stories.”
“The Master of Allusion & Her Tangled Web: Citation/Tagging as Inclusive Gratitude”
Submitted to the ALSCW panel “Allusion as Exclusion and Inclusion: Only Connect?“
Abstract:
Allusions sound intimidating, but it’s an illusion. The problem for students and lay readers is that we send them to hunt for references to texts like the Bible or Greek myths that, for better or worse, they aren’t familiar with in the way (educated, white, male) readers were in earlier centuries. My solution: we can help them make connections through annotations, citations, and tags, telling them where to look. T.S. Eliot modeled this practice with his notes accompanying The Waste Land, a masterwork of allusion comprehensible because he gave us the key (and it really is accessible with his notes; I’ve taught it to high school sophomores!). Citing our literary and cultural networks is super easy, barely an inconvenience in the days of the Internet, accomplished with the click of a button, so this is a gift we can afford to give to our students and readers.[1]
This kind of signposting doesn’t only help us get readers where we want them to go. It also allows us to pay homage to the works and artists we love and that have shaped our thinking. Really, allusion is just a fancy name for the associations we constantly make in our thoughts, the trail left behind when one thing reminds us of another. All together, these connections make up what Jung called the collective unconscious, but allusions, when cited, allow us to celebrate the nodes and nexuses most important to the way we see the world. By using allusion to situate ourselves in this tangled web, we also define who we are. Jesus was the master at this, living his life as an allusion to the stories of the Hebrew Bible to show us what God is like and the role He wants to play. Allusion allows us both to thank and connect to the people whose art we admire (it’s why I keep tagging Lin Manuel Miranda in my Instagram photos; I dream of interviewing him about his work/becoming besties) and to signal our own affiliations (always revealing, since we can only allude to what we ourselves read/watch; we are what we eat, metaphorically). A tag is the work of the graffiti artist, who leaves their mark on the wall for all to see and thus permanently inscribes their perspective on the landscape. Through allusion, we create a reciprocal relationship with the art we reference, entering a chat and creating a receipt that changes both our work and theirs for good. Of course, we’ll never cite or catch them all, because pieces of art constantly sound with unexpected resonances, the humanities equivalent to quantum entanglement that binds separate particles together. And that’s the fun of allusions; those of us who have mastered them get to go on Easter egg hunts, and we never know what goodies we might find! To see an example of the kind of allusive tagging I’m talking about, check out the archive of my Juneteenth party on funoverfear.org, the website of the larger project I’m working on. It might help you spot some of the many uncited allusions in this abstract (including in the title); enjoy!
[1] Hot take: the nitpicky citations that our students hate learning and I hate grading are on their way out, now that we can easily add a tag or link online.
“My Surprise Wedding to Jesus: The Weirdest Thing I’ve Ever Done and What I Learned”
Submitted to the ALSCW 2025 panel “Confessional Writing: Memoir, Essays, and Religion”
Abstract:
I’ve been a devout Christian all my life, but I always found the devotional practices offered to me by the Evangelical tradition in which I was raised somewhat lackluster. Last summer, I went on a pilgrimage to England, walking sections of the Pilgrim’s Way from Winchester to Canterbury and learning about how Medieval Christians related to God. Inspired by the examples of nuns and mystics who identified with the Bride of Christ, on Pentecost Sunday I threw myself a surprise wedding to Jesus, which I livestreamed for anyone who wanted to watch. In an intimate ceremony at sunset on a lakeside dock where I’ve prayed many times, I asked my dad for his blessing, sang hymns, and then sat in silence with my dog to keep vigil and wait on the Lord.
Most of my viewers were baffled, but it was a profound experience for me, one that affirmed my commitment to my faith and Christ’s love for me. The ceremony was a performance in the sense of J.L. Austin’s performative speech acts, troubling binary thinking prevalent in Evangelicalism that would attempt to label my claim that to be marrying Jesus true or false. Instead, my surprise wedding enacted the playful truth of metaphor, a kind of sympathetic magic in which two unlike things are revealed to be like, and the embodied, incarnational truth of the Christian sacraments, which allow believers to experience and live out their faith through performative rituals. I hope that it was “wyrd” in the original sense of the word, an event that unveils new possibilities and reminds us that, if we dare to be different, we can choose our fates.
“Why I Still Care: ‘No Coward Soul Is Mine’”
Submitted to the 2025 Victorians Institute Conference: “Victorian Studies: Who Cares?”
Abstract:
I last presented at Victorians Institute in 2018. I was months away from finishing my PhD at Princeton, preparing to apply for jobs and postdocs, sure my future in Victorian Studies was bright. Now, seven years later, the picture looks very different. I never got an academic job. When I pivoted to teach high school, I discovered that many schools no longer teach British literature at all. And after several years teaching in the midst of the COVID pandemic, I burned out. I’m currently unemployed. It might seem like our field has failed me.
However, when my mom died in 2021 and I stood before a church full of mourners, I took off my mask and read Emily Brontë’s “No Coward Soul Is Mine.” My world was falling apart, and I had no words of my own to express my emotions. Yet I knew instinctively where to turn. Brontë’s poem was a life raft, giving me something to hold on to as the waves of grief broke over me.
In this essay, blending memoir and literary analysis, I will examine the lasting connection in Victorian literature between faith and feeling. Drawing on the work on scholars like Charles LaPorte (The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare), I will consider how the Victorians’ devotional relationship to poetry, often elevated to
sacred text as Biblical authority waned, still shapes our experience and understanding of emotion today.
Books
Mirror, Mirror: How I Did Disney Therapy and Learned to (Be) Hope blends memoir, literary criticism, and psychoanalysis to analyze how recent Disney franchises (Encanto, Tangled, Frozen, and Moana) use Christian symbolism to tell stories of emotional healing and growth. It’s based on my own experience of doing “Disney therapy,” using Disney characters to conceptualize the “parts” or sub-personalities described by Richard C. Schwartz in his Internal Family Systems model and to plot narrative arcs to help my parts heal. People often label their parts (ie “my anxious part”), but imagining them as characters instead empowers us to think about what the characters we identify with needed to learn and then apply the lesson to our own lives. Basically, I’ve decided the modern Disney princesses are my role models and now take all my life advice from Disney movies; it’s working out for me!
Daughters of Eve: Literary Genealogies
How to Argue: Templates for Teaching Writing
Good Intentions (a memoir)
Hope PhD 